Magnifying Innovation: Understanding Organizations’ Adoption of Novel Design Practices

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

To continue to enhance the innovation that is essential for the US economy and to address critical societal challenges, new and better processes for innovation must be both developed and adopted by key innovation drivers - from boardroom executives to basement startups. The primary goal of this work is to understand how and why industrial design organizations adopt innovation methods or fail to do so, and to identify and transfer best practices for method adoption to the academic and industrial innovation communities. The project will investigate the adoption of new innovation methods through the study of methods and practices that are currently receiving mixed adoption in large industrial R&D settings. In particular, the studies will target the adoption of Biologically Inspired Design (BID) and Patent Mining (PM), which are particularly timely and relevant to today’s societal challenges, in order to identify the characteristics associated with the success or failure to adopt new design methods. Design research is concerned with developing tools and methods to enhance design, either by increasing efficiency or effectiveness or both, along one dimension or another (e.g., to reduce the time to generate a new design, to generate more innovative designs, to generate designs with fewer resources, to employ assistive technologies). Yet, despite our best efforts, we find that the tools and methods developed through research are rarely broadly adopted in industrial settings. This research program seeks to understand both the barriers and catalysts of industrial adoption of new design methods by focusing on the adoption cycles of two novel and rising methods of design: Biologically Inspired Design (BID) and Patent Mining (PM). Each method was selected as representative of current trends in design: interdisciplinarity, sustainable design, and data-enhanced design. This investigation of the complex system of design will seek to understand the design needs of large industrial R&D innovators (including those of Global 500 brands) and large government R&D organizations as a subset of strong influencers in the design methods domain within a much larger innovation ecosystem. We will begin with a series of semi-structured interviews to identify barriers and catalysts to adoption, followed by widely distributed surveys to understand experiences with design methods in a much larger sample. The final stage will provide in situ, non-retrospective analysis of Biologically Inspired Design and Patent Mining by comparing three modes of dissemination: workshops, collaborative projects with industry, and semester-long distance learning courses. Taken together, these studies will allow us to triangulate among common practices and patterns that will assist future researchers with the direction, dissemination, and adoption of their work. Another outcome of this research will be a network of industrial researchers who may be leveraged for future work of this type, along with a set of operating protocols for reducing “research friction” within academic and industrial partnerships. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.